Ski Jumpers Jump Through Hoops

The free rum drinks helped you handle the many incongruities earlier this week on the third floor of Norwood, a private club in downtown New York City, but they were still pretty acute. In the main party room were numerous socialites (male and female), two expert ski jumpers, members of the art scene, and Rachel Dratch, of Saturday Night Live, while in a small side room (what the townhouse’s 19th-century floorplan would call the nursery, I think) a television crew for Telemundo had tucked itself. On and near the bar lay large platters of cubed cheese, dried apricots, and pickles, ringed by sunflower sprouts and prunes.

The biggest puzzle of the evening, however, was the party’s official focus: why elite female ski jumpers have been prevented from competing, as men do, in the winter Olympics, including those to be held next year in Vancouver, Canada. The party was thrown to draw attention to the inequity and the women’s attempts to overcome it, and to celebrate Fighting Gravity, a documentary on the subject directed by Alex Mar and executive-produced by Virginia Madsen. (The film is still in production.)

Ski jumping—the act of skiing off a ramp and landing, hopefully, far away and with good technique—is the only sport in the winter Olympics restricted to male athletes. In November 2006, the International Olympic Committee rejected an application to include female jumpers in the Vancouver games, saying that their sport needed more time to develop. But critics say that women’s ski jumping has the technical merit and international representation needed for inclusion in the games now, and, in fact, that its statistics beat those of other Olympic sports. (For instance, there are 157 active women ski jumpers from 18 countries registered with the International Ski Federation, but in 2006, when ski cross, the popular X Game sport, was granted admission to the Olympics, there were only 30 ski-cross women from 10 nations registered with the I.S.F.)

At the party, several ski-jump experts suggested some alternative reasons for women’s exclusion from the games: namely, a particular kind of European sexism. Excellence in ski jumping is a matter of technique more than muscle, they say, and women (often teenage girls, actually) frequently match or exceed men’s performances. Jessica Jerome, a ski jumper on the U.S. team who had flown in with her teammate Alissa Johnson for the party, explained: “With a lot of sports, let’s say half-pipe snowboarding, the guys, generally, are getting bigger air and they’re doing more daring tricks and you can see a difference by looking at it. But with jumping, if you didn’t see the hair coming out of the back of the helmet, you wouldn’t really be able to tell a difference most of the time. The best girls in the world are not far off.”

One of the original Nordic sports, ski jumping is much more popular in Europe than it is in the United States, and in Alpine areas, it’s considered by some to be an important part of the regional heritage, one that demonstrates, as bullfighting might in Spain (or football does here), the strength of a man. A woman making the same jump on the same ramp would invalidate the evidence. “It’s kind of an old boys’ club,” Jerome says. “Obviously I can’t speak for these people, but I feel like a lot of the times they think that when spectators see women [ski jump well], it takes away the extreme aspect of it. [Spectators] might say, ‘Oh, well if an 18-year-old girl can do it, then it’s not that hard-core.’” Despite the potential for women’s technical parity with men in the sport, however, both Jerome and Johnson say that they don’t want to be compared to male jumpers, and would prefer to have separate competitions.

Last year, Jerome, current women’s world champion Lindsey Van, and eight others filed a lawsuit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee, saying that the exclusion of women’s ski jumping from the 2010 Olympics is a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. A hearing is set for April 20. A victory party at Norwood has not yet been scheduled, but I am hopeful.